Several users have already reported this on Oondasta's page, but everyone's favorite dinosaur now more frequently respawns. If you haven't tried Oondasta yet, he's located on the Isle of Giants and drops ilvl 522 loot with dinosaur-themed names.

Taepsilum

Agreed, this is an amazing fight of epic proportions and really tiny arms. We definitely want players to have more chances to experience it. The epicness should be about fighting it, not about finding when it spawns, even though that can also be somewhat fun as long as the timer is not so long that it gets frustrating.

You should be able to find Mr. “Tiny Hands” Oondasta a bit more often now.

Daxxarri

Much of the time, 'fun' items are nerfed to prevent an exploit of one sort or another.

Cheaters are why you can't have nice things. Well, they're still pretty nice, just not as often.

Click the cut to read the other recent blue posts!

Blue Tweets

PvP dev Holinka talked about some of the changes and shortcomings with this season's Honor Gear, and Ghostcrawler hinted at LFR loot changes.

Holinka

Stamina on New Honor Gear

Stam on honor gear was buffed. But we will not be buffing it to same ilevel as 2/2 upgraded gear (8 ilevels)

Honor vs Conquest Gear

When I equip tyrni head over male one, I LOSE -0.22% resi, even though base resi is higher and gems/reforge etc is identical. (1/2)Yes, the honor gear has more resilience to make it more powerful than its ilevel shows. Agree it doesn't feel good. Source

Ghostcrawler

Alts in MoP

Making a main take 100% and all of the alts 0% means you're not actually playing an alt. Needs to be somewhere in the middle.Crafting alts is an interesting topic. I have a concern some have them to get around 2 prof limit not because they enjoy alts. Source

No New Dungeons for Rest of MoP

Adding a couple doesn't give people much to do. You have to do a lot, and that comes at the expense of other content.4.3 had 3 good 5-player dungeons, but the raid received its share of criticism. There is a connection. Always love to do more. Source

LFR Gear

Q: Is going into LFR as "tank" but choosing "DPS" gear still a consideration?A: We hope to provide a better option next patch or two. Source

Dailies in WoW

Bashiok

I think one of the issues is not the amount of dailies, but the feeling that they're mandatory. We don't have any VP items on the new 5.2 daily reps (not technically true there are a couple, but they're low enough ilvl as to not feel mandatory for raiders), and we'll see how that feels for everyone. There's also not a lot of clarity about what you should be doing to progress in the most efficient way. If you hit 90 today you'd be wise to run some Heroics and only do the 5.1 dailies until you have the ilvl to queue for 5.0 LFR's, and then progress to 5.2 LFR, and you can probably ignore pretty much everything else. That is, if getting to 5.2 raids is your goal.

But that's the important question, what is your goal? Why are you doing all of the dailies? What are you looking to accomplish? If it's to see the raid content then certainly working on all of the dailies every day is not going to help get you there, or at least not very quickly. And like you said trying to do all of them every day can really eat up a big chunk of time.

We have a lot of level-cap questing content because there are a lot of people that just like questing, and it's there and gives some reward for doing it, but if you don't like that kind of content we don't want for it to feel mandatory. 5.2 was one step in that direction and if it feels like a good compromise for everyone we can keep going that way. If you want a big shiny dragon, sure you'll have to spend time on dailies, but it won't keep you from being able to progress smoothly, or feeling like you're missing out on an avenue of progression.

Taepsilum

Usually I always side with arguments that have to do with helping to make any game more intuitive for players, but the addition of a confirmation box would just serve as a warning sign, it wouldn’t really provide any new, more intuitive description of the item, so chances are you would probably go back and read the tooltip more carefully or just right-click it and ignore the tooltip for the 2nd time anyway. So, sure it could help, but is it the ideal solution?

The tooltip text is there and it’s pretty straightforward “These summoned opponents will require a group to defeat.”.You can try to make a case about tooltips (in general) not being the best design to convey information about any item but the text itself seems intuitive to me.

“Click first, read later” might be a consequence of two things, bad design, or players’ laziness, and I’ve got to say I’m leaning more towards the latter (not criticizing, I do exactly the same thing). Although I’m sure that tooltips have room for improvement, I think players tend to be quite lazy when it comes to reading any kind of textual information, this is a consequence, in my opinion, of WoW having 5+8 years of continuous development, making it an extremely extensive game with daunting amounts of text, players have simply learned to ignore it, except for those that are heavily interested into lore.

Sorry if I diverge, but I'm particularly interested in what this subject might lead into.There are many other reasons for this kind of behaviour; for example, in the old days players would read quests from start to finish, essentially due to 2 reasons:- Quest texts had a flow, they were displayed almost at normal reading speed. (there is still this option, but most players turn instant text on)- There was much less information on the web, it was a lot harder to get quick solutions, more often than not, players would read the quests, try to decipher the riddles or puzzles by themselves and when they couldn’t solve them fast enough they would either turn to thottbot or ask friends for help.

Nowadays players end up on Wowhead before they even open the quests, which kind of makes you wonder why this is happening, is it the competitiveness, the rush to 90, the feeling of being overwhelmed with information, are quests no longer fun? Are they too many? If so, what changed, and what would make them more captivating? Quests are a huge part of the game, they can be either really boring if you choose to “skip to the last page” and look at the answers on 3rd party sites, or they can be super fun and exciting if you solve them by yourself. There’s also lot of creativity, subtle and witty humour going into these quest texts, so you’re also skipping on a whole lot of good laughs if you don’t read them.

What is your opinion on what can be done to compel players to become more interactive with the game and stop this behaviour of fetching for quick solutions and skipping any in-game reading, is this a consequence of the game environment or just typical human behaviour in this day and age? I’m only dwelling on this subject because I think this is quite a big issue as it makes players miss a lot of the fun and entertainment that is locked inside WoW, and to unlock it players just need to go back to a more relaxed play style, take their time to level and experience the full adventure.There have always been players whose sole interest was getting to max level as fast as possible, and that’s totally fine, but it feels like that play style has managed to spread into a more standardized and common practice as players now seem to think that it’s the “normal” way to play the game, and adopt that very same play style from the very beginning.

Role of Tanks

Draztal

Tanking is a very unappreciated role (by some) in the game. From DPS that decide they'll set the pace at which the packs must be pulled (arguing that they're losing time otherwise) to healers complaining when a mob is loose on a DPS...To raids blaming the tanks when something goes wrong.

If you add to tanking that, usually, the raid expects them to lead the group as well, it's not really a surprise that many players don't wish to check it out at all. It's not really that tanking is difficult (it's no more difficult than healing or damaging, that's for sure) but all the other things added on top. A slacking DPS might not even get anyone's attention. But a "newbie" tank that is still learning the hang of things? If he/she is in a hostile group, the experience will probably put that person away for good.

So, there's a community side to it. Less hostility would go a long way to encourage others to try to play as tanks or healers. But of course, the moment someone (as a DPS or a healer) decides that they're done with the tank deciding the pace because it's too slow for their taste, things go south. Quickly. There're few experiences in gaming worse than having your gameplay experience being taken away from you due to inconsiderate folks. Yes, there are newbie tanks and healers at level 90. No, it's not fine to go arguing that just because your mana bar is full they have to chain pull for you. If someone wants chain pulling on their dungeon, well, they should roll a tank and do it themselves.

It's one of those things where, even if the devs made it so that you could tank with just auto attack on, a part of the community would still refuse to try it just because of everything else that gets piled on top of that role.

A little kindness from others would probably go a long way to make things better for others and encourage both veteran and new players to experience other roles. Just think about it from a personal level. Some of you will probably feel no kind of interest on playing those roles. Sure, that's normal. It's to be expected. Not everyone likes everything in the game. But how many of you have actually thought of trying it, only to decide that it's not worth it based on what you've seen other tanks/healers had to deal with?